Friday, September 14, 2012

Guillaume Apollinaire, one of the few
great poets who were also charming, has a delightful book of essays,
Le Flaneur des deux rives (The Stroller Through Paris), about his walks through the quarters
on both sides of the Seine. He meets a library buff, a chap who has
sampled libraries all over the world.

One such was the St. Petersburg
Library, where “one could see young girls (gamines) age twelve who
were reading Schopenhauer.” If this is so—and why not, if even
the fancy stripper in Pal Joey thinks
of Schopenhauer while she works—it is true immortality: to be read
ages after your death by twelve-year-old girls (note the plural);
there surely can be no greater proof of undying fame.

Unfortunately, though, this is not the
kind of immortality the nonphilosophical majority of us seek—the
kind that works for everyone else except for the dead immortal. We
want immortality for us ordinary folk, and we want it to be
physical--to defeat death.

That means those of us who might take
John Donne literally: “One short sleep past, we wake eternally,/
And Death shall be no more: Death thou shalt die.” A promise not
just from Donne, but also, more importantly. from almost all existing
religions, which affirm some kind of Paradise. But where exactly is
that Heaven located? Formerly, one could believe it to be somewhere
in the heavens above. But now that the skies have been duly
crisscrossed, and no Heaven found, isn’t it surprising that
otherwise perfectly intelligent people believe in it? Or, for that
matter, now that we know the interior of the Earth, that there should
still be belief in Hell. Quite aside from the fact that the Earth is
far too small a place to contain all those dead who would have headed
for its insides.

And yet there have been people like T.
S. Eliot, for example, who, despite a colossal intellect, have
swallowed Christianity whole, ergo, whether or not he discussed it,
belief in Heaven and Hell. Even as smart a man as Bill Buckley
affirmed that he could not live without his firm belief of reuniting
with his predeceased wife. I am less surprised when an Argentine
tennis player, having won a set, crosses himself and looks to heaven
even on an indoor court. And we all know the footballer who kneels
and thanks Christ after a touchdown, as if Jesus had nothing better
to do than help him win.

Then there are all those brave people
who assert that they are not afraid of death, only of protracted
dying. In other words, eternal sleep is no problem, only the
discomfort of prolonged insomnia preceding it. Believe them as much
as you do actors who claim never to read their reviews. A vast
majority wants to go on living physically, no matter how precariously
or where, even if their religion doesn’t promise them sex with 72
virgins in the afterlife. This even though sex with one virgin can
spell trouble.

A writer as brilliant as Julian Barnes
writes a whole book about how we shouldn’t fear death, although
almost every page of that book testifies to the opposite. To my
knowledge, only one religion, Judaism, doesn’t make paradisiac
promises—well, maybe also Unitarianism, if indeed that qualifies as
a religion.

To be sure, nobody said that atheism
comes cheap. I myself cannot help envying the comforts of belief in
Heaven, even by those who could barely rate Purgatory. These are
people who have no need for either John Donne or Julian Barnes, and
count on the kind of wings that cannot crash by colliding with a
flock of birds.

What consolation is there for atheists?
Or, to quote the aforementioned Eliot, after such knowledge, what
forgiveness? I suppose a feeling, earned or unearned, of superiority.
Condescension is not without its questionable satisfaction: “You
poor fellow, you actually believe you are going to Heaven? And the
moon, I assume, is made of green cheese?” (As if anyone wanted his
cheese green.) But wouldn’t one trade superiority for faith, if
only one were capable of the Pascalian gamble?

And what about those good souls who
believe that having children is a form of immortality? Lots of luck
to them when they wake up—or, rather, don’t—in their coffins.
Think of the dead Heraclitus in William Cory’s famous poem,
concluding: “Still are thy pleasant voices, thy nightingales,
awake;/ For death, he taketh all away, but them he cannot take.”
That may be good enough immortality for Cory and Callimachus, on
whose poem Cory’s is based, but hardly for Heraclitus. And what
about those of us who have no children or nightingales, not so much
as a canary?

The best we can come up with is an
enlightened hedonism—having lived life to the fullest. Or else its
opposite, stoicism, poohpoohing the pleasures of life. Yet I am not
sure whether even Epicurus or Epictetus—Marcus Aurelius at least
had his imperial privileges—made it to full fearless happiness, and
death be damned. So what can we lesser ones aspire to? The good life
and peaceful death are only the snake scotch’d, not kill’d.
Possibly the best way is to expire on top of a sexy woman just after
orgasm—the John Garfield and Nelson Rockefeller way, and the obverse,
of course, for a woman. Not for nothing did we learn in our lit.
courses that for the Elizabethans “to die” meant both death and
orgasm. Coming and going, as it were. But what of all that long,
unorgasmic time before?

Consider the modus operandi of two
wonderful writers, Jules Renard and Peter Altenberg, skeptical
Frenchman and euphoric Austrian. Renard, in what is surely one of the
greatest journals ever kept, wrote in 1898: “Your head is bizarre,
carved in big strokes of the knife, like that of geniuses. Your brow
brightens like that of Socrates. By way of phrenology, you remind us
of Cromwell, Napoleon and so many others, and yet you will be
nothing.” And, likewise about himself: “You will be nothing. You
understand the greatest poets, the most profound prose writers, but,
though you pretend that to understand is to equal, you will be as
comparable to them as a minuscule dwarf can be to the giants.”

The superb humorist Altenberg wrote in
1901: “I was nothing, I am nothing, I will be nothing. But I live
out my life in freedom and allow noble and compassionate persons to
participate in the adventures of that inner freedom in that I commit
it, in the most compact form, to paper. I am poor, but I myself. The
man without concessions. What does that get you? 100 guilders a month
and a few ardent fans. Well, those I have! My life is dedicated to
the unheard-of enthusiasm for God’s greatest art work, the female
body.”

And he goes on about the nudes with
which he has papered the walls of his poor little room, and the
inscriptions under them, such as “Beauty is Virtue.” And he
concludes with the joy of waking up gazing at this “sacred
magnificence,” which reconciles him to the neediness and burdens of
existence.

So there you have it. The stoic,
skeptic or cynic Renard (though even he relished beautiful women),
and the exultant hedonist Altenberg. They may have had the antidote
for mortality. Or maybe not.

About Me

I've written for over 50 years on theatre, film, literature, music and fine arts for the Hudson Review, New Leader, New Criterion, National Review, New York magazine, Opera News, Weekly Standard, Broadway.com, Bloomberg News, The Westchester Guardian and on the Yonkers Tribune website. I'm continuing my contributions to the New York Times Book Review, Weekly Standard and New Criterion. Recently I've been seen on Heat Street. I have a PhD from Harvard University in Comparative Literature.